Upcoming Mapping ACS Data Workshop
I stepped forth from the shadows to the marketplace
Hi everyone, this is the section where I say I hope everyone fared ok through the various calamities that have been inflicted on Houston since I last sent an email. I hope you all have fared well through Beryl and Centerpoint.
This edition is shorter than the previous ones, I’ve been busy preparing a free workshop called “Gaining Insights from Mapping ACS Data in Harris County” that will be taking place next Wednesday, August 21 at 12pm. You can register here.
The American Community Survey (ACS) is an ongoing survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau that provides information about socioeconomic factors in American life. It’s different that the census in terms of how it’s administered, how often it’s measured, and its focus areas. The ACS collects detailed data on social, economic, and demographic characteristics down to the neighborhood level, offering a more current and comprehensive picture of the nation's population than the 10-year census alone.
I’ve found the American Community Survey (ACS) data to be very useful in a lot of my work. We used it a lot in the Houston Arrow, and there’s been a number of other good use cases I’ve come across which I’ll talk more about in the webinar. We'll look at language, education, housing, employment, and health data with a special focus on Harris County.
This session will equip you with skills to obtain, interpret, analyze, and map ACS data so you can gain insights on how socioeconomic factors in Harris County effect your work. We'll be using R and Felt (a no-code mapping tool). Some familiarity with R is helpful, but no experience in either is necessary. And I can promise plenty of slides in the Utopian Scholastic style.
I’d love it if people came to the webinar with some ideas of how it can apply in their work, but also no worry if you don’t. Either way I’d love to see you join.
One last note for this one, VP candidate Tim Walz is apparently very into maps, I appreciated his talk at an ESRI conference earlier this year. I think it gives some interesting insight into how he governs, and what data-driven governance can mean. Check it out here.
As always, I’d love to hear any thoughts or questions, or you can just reply and say hi. See you all on zoom.com





The frog: *chef’s kiss*